Who Gets to Choose?Follow

I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let the admin go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Sigh. No.



What you are describing is a benefit, not a right. That's the point I'm trying to drill into people's heads. Rights are not things you give to people. It's the constant misapplication of the "right" label to things that aren't rights that is the problem.



Yes it is. Because... wait for it... they are not rights. That is precisely the point I'm trying to get you to understand. The Left deliberately mislabels certain benefits as "rights" so that they can convince people that if we don't provide them to people, we're violating their rights.



Except that the entire problem is people advocating for something on the basis of it being a right, when the thing they are advocating for isn't a right at all. I'm not avoiding anything. Those who engage in labeling benefits as rights are because by doing so they hope to avoid discussing the merits of the thing they are proposing. That is the entire point of calling those things rights.

I know it's common. It should not be though. It bugs me every single time someone says this because it perpetuates a false perception of what rights are and are not. The fact that people do something wrong a lot of the time doesn't make it any less wrong. And yes, this is why I keep harping on this. Because it's so common.



Except most people don't know what's being discussed. That's the point. They really do think it's a right and not a benefit we're talking about. I wouldn't make an issue of this if I didn't constantly run into arguments of the form of "X is a right, so you are violating people's rights by opposing X (when X isn't actually a right)". This same misuse of the term "right" is at the heart of nearly every single political disagreement we have in our society. So yeah, I'm going to point it out every single time someone argues that I'm violating people's rights because I oppose providing them with a benefit.

Now, if more people made arguments of the form "This benefit provides X, and only costs Y, and grants us Z other benefits, so it's worth spending the money providing it", I'd be ok with it. In fact, I've made that precise form of argument for things like publicly funded K-12 education. It's a valid argument. But the second someone says public education is a right, I have a problem with it. It's not a right. It's a benefit. That does not mean that it's not worthwhile to provide it, but then make the argument based on that fact. Calling it a right and then dismissing any disagreement as a violation of rights is a dishonest approach.



I've already answered this.



No, it's not. Your problem is that you have a problem distinguishing the actual thing from the right to the thing. This is what I'm trying to get you to understand. Rights are about the government (arguably any authority) *not* acting to restrict your own actions. It is *never* about taking an action to provide you with something. So a right to own property does not mean that the government must act to ensure that you own property, only that it not act to prevent you from doing so. The right to eat food means that the government can't act to prevent you from eating food, not that it must give you food.

And the right to marry is the right to enter into a social/legal relationship in the absence of the government action. The legal status of "marriage" is not actually marriage. It's a set of benefits/regulations that the government applies to marriages. Again though, people tend to not understand the difference, which leads us to the whole disagreement. You have no right to qualify for a government status. Ever. You have a right to enter into a legally binding contract with another person. You have a right to exchange rings and vows. You have a right to choose to share your lives together. Because all of these things you could do in the absence of any specific government action.

That's what makes things rights. It's why it's so important for people to understand that the government does not give you rights. It can only promise not to infringe them. If more people understood this, we'd have a lot fewer political disagreements.



Yes it is very useful. The problem is that we've lived so many generations in a society that embraces liberalism that we've forgotten what it's like to not have it. We don't know what it's like to live in a society where you had no right to not have anything you own taken from you (or weren't allowed to own property in the first place). So many have begun to think that it's not enough just to have assurances that what you have can't be taken away, but that we must be provided for. It's the very ignorance of what makes something a right that leads to this bizarre conclusion though. And the irony is that in the process of pursing these fake rights, people are often required to give up real rights to get them. But because they don't know what makes something a right, they don't realize this.



There is no right to vote. People who say that are incorrect.

We do, however, have a right to control our own actions and lives, and in our system of government we implement this by electing representatives to government to act on our behalf (they're our proxies). So while the vote itself is not a right, it is a means by which something that is a right is implemented. The vote itself is just an arbitrary methodology though and not at all a right.

Again, the version of "right" that you use means this. Great we've established this. There are different kinds of rights, the fact that you don't like that doesn't really matter. I get that it bugs you. Your version of rights bugs me. I don't try to distract from the conversation by saying you shouldn't use that word though.

There is no such thing as property without a government creating and enforcing it, so under your system, the right to own property is meaningless and can't be a right anyway. We can also understand that as there are different kinds of rights there are different outcomes when we as a society enshrine something as a right.

I can see people doing this, but fundamentally the discussion should be whether something should be a right or not. Rights are meaningless unless a society enshrines them in some way. I would also say that a right is important but not useful if it not paired with ability.

Edited, Nov 11th 2014 7:31pm by Xsarus

You're not expecting consistency, are you?

No, but I'd like a little challenge. I didn't even have to stop paying attention to Flash with this one.

The version of "right" that was used by those who invented the idea of "rights" means this. Applying the word to something else means you are talking about something else. I'm not sure how much more clear I can be about this.



You're arguing for "positive rights". I get it. I disagree that such things exist. I firmly believe that the entire argument and label was invented specifically to get a society that placed great weight on rights to accept a set of benefits they would otherwise oppose. It's a terrible word manipulation because it exists solely to justify itself. It's cart before the horse logic.



Huh? Of course there is such a thing as property without a government creating and enforcing it. What the government does is protect your "right" to your property. It does not give you the property, nor does the existence of the government create the property nor the right to it. How can you not grasp this? Are you seriously trying to suggest that a physical object can't exist without a government existing first? Cause that's bizarre.



Ok then. How about you answer the same question I did? What do you think makes something a right? You made a huge deal about how meaningless my use of the term is, but I'd argue that the alternative is even more so. In your interpretation, a "right" is just whatever thing we're making a big deal about at the moment. It's completely useless because anything can be a right. Or do you have some definition of rights that limits it in any way? I'd really like to hear your definition.



But my issue is that if you don't have a reason why rights should be enshrined, then they cease to have value. We continue to place weight on "rights" largely as a matter of social momentum. The more things we just arbitrarily decide are rights, but that don't have any innate reason to be so (other than we just decided to label them that way), the less value we will place on them.

Today, if someone says "I own a Lamborghini", you'd assume that person owns a really nice sports car that cost a lot of money. And you'd be correct. But if Lamborghini started selling a $20k economy car with the Lamborghini brand on it, people would buy the car because of the name. They could say "I own a Lamborghini", even though they don't actually have a really nice sports car that cost them a lot of money. Over time, the Lamborghini brand would lose value and no one would place weight on the name any more. Because now, if someone says "I own a Lamborghini", it could mean that they just own a cheap economy car with a badge on it.

That's what's going on here. We place great weight on rights precisely because they represent the very limited and very important things that I've been talking about. If we apply the label to other things though, the label ceases to have the same weight. That why IMO it's very important to make a distinction between rights and benefits. Because just as in the example above, the purpose of slapping a Lamborghini sticker on the cheap car was to get people to buy it even though it's cheap, the reason to slap the "rights" label on a benefit is to get people to accept it, even though it's not really a right. It's deception, nothing more.

the object exists. Your relationship to it as property is a social construct.

A right is something a society decides to enshrine in law as a right. This is certainly often the right to do something that society should not infringe on, but it is not limited to that. I think we both agree that rights regardless of your perspective are not something to consider lightly, they are something we place additional weight in. Perhaps I shouldn't have said meaningless, not useful may have been more accurate.

yeah, we get that. But when your only response to a position is to say that, you're not really saying anything at all.

Edited, Nov 11th 2014 8:33pm by Xsarus

Oh. And just because I haven't linked Locke recently:



Property most definitely exists in the absence of government and man has a "right" to it. You have to always understand that government action infringes our rights. It does not give them to us. The choice to be governed is always about balancing a small number of lost freedoms against the need to have a means to protect the greatest number of them. This is why it's monumentally important to know the difference between a right and a benefit. Because only if you know what is and isn't a right can you correctly asses whether your government is acting in a way that maximizes your rights. Since all government actions infringe rights, only those which protect more rights provide a net gain (or minimize the loss). If you think that benefits are rights, you'll start giving away rights in return for benefits, and the net effect is a greater loss of freedom.


This is not some minor issue. It is arguably the most important thing for any citizen of a free society to know and understand. Because if you don't you will eventually end out as a slave.

Edited, Nov 11th 2014 6:43pm by gbaji

Um... You're kidding right?



No. I'm not going to take the time and effort to change the terminology being used in a discussion when there's no need to in that discussion. Didn't I just explain this to you?

And since slavery=taxation (to you) then we're all property of the government!!

It's the circle of gbaji!!!


Edited, Nov 11th 2014 8:00pm by Bijou

A man on a deserted island with a coconut would disagree with you.



My idea of freedom is based on the idea of freedom that the folks who came up with the idea used. What other "idea" should we use?

If you disagree, then why don't you provide your idea of what freedom is? I've asked this several times now. Funny how you keep harping on me for using terms like "rights" and "freedom" in precisely the way the historical sources of those terms uses them, but you can't be bothered to provide an alternative.

And once again, I just pointed out how just because you type words and call it an explanation that it doesn't actually make it correct. Maybe it'll work to distract people from your flipflopping, though. I mean, I'm not distracted, but I'm to you as you are to an ant so that's to be expected. I'm sure everyone is stupid enough to be distracted by a label, even though it didn't work not even an hour ago. Maybe this time!